A Dominican Invitation to Witness [Saints Bookclub]

Last updated on: June 10, 2015 at 2:34 pm By Leah Libresco

In 2015, I’m reading and blogging through Ronald Knox’s collection of sermons on Christian exemplars, Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes. Every Monday (kinda), I’ll be writing about the next portrait in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. Maybe I wouldn’t have been slow to get back into blogging through Knox’s sermons on the saints if I had noticed that the next chapter was on St. Dominic — after all, I owe a lot to... Read more

What I Read On My Book Tour

Last updated on: June 5, 2015 at 11:14 am By Leah Libresco

Sorry for the low posting volume, folks — I’ve spent the last two weeks in New York City and Boston, doing book talks, radio, science museum trips (ok, that last is not technically related to *publicizing* Arriving at Amen, but it is totally in the spirit of the book), and I’ve been a little tuckered out. The train trips did give me a lot of time for reading of my own, though, so here’s the rundown of what I read while... Read more

Good Fights, Like Good Friendships, Are A Long-Term Promise

Last updated on: June 3, 2015 at 3:02 pm By Leah Libresco

Monique Ocampo runs a series of interviews with Catholic women on Wednesdays and I’m her guest this week. I’ve posted a snippet of our discussion below, but you can read the full Q&A at her place. How do you balance working in news with apologetics? Most of the time, there’s no balancing act at all — I don’t write apologetics at work; I cover statistics-heavy facets of the day’s news. The biggest way that my faith impacts my writing is... Read more

Concussion Tests and a Voting Mess [538]

Last updated on: May 31, 2015 at 10:36 am By Leah Libresco

Here’s the roundup of what I’ve been working on at FiveThirtyEight over the last week: The ‘One Person, One Vote’ Case Relies On Statistics That Nobody Has The plaintiffs are challenging the usual method (counting total number of people living in a district) and are asking that states use the total number of eligible voters instead. The trouble is, we don’t have robust statistics on the number of eligible voters. If the Supreme Court were to set new standards... Read more

Letting Prayer Lead from Self to Other

Last updated on: May 26, 2015 at 9:50 am By Leah Libresco

Tonight I’m speaking in NYC at First Things at 6p. I hope to see some of you there or next week when I do a Theology on Tap in Boston on June 2nd. As part of the Patheos Book Club, I got to do a Q&A with Will Duquette about Arriving at Amen. Will’s a great guy, a third order Dominican and the kind of person who titles his blog “Cry Woof! And let slip the dogs of whimsy…” Here are a... Read more

The Publishing Milestone that No One Mentions

Last updated on: May 21, 2015 at 3:57 pm By Leah Libresco

This might be the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in the midst of launching my first book. Last week, I reposted one of those perennial facebook memes: Since I was reading The Little Book of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr, I typed up the appropriate page 45 sentence: To use an image that is more organic, we might diagram restorative justice as a flower. My friends added quotes of their own, and then one of them posted this! The... Read more

Accidental Stylites and the Benedict Option

Last updated on: May 20, 2015 at 2:25 pm By Leah Libresco

This weekend, I’m hosting an in-person discussion of “the Benedict Option” — ways for modern Christians to root their faith so that they can wind up living it more fully and more joyfully. Rod Dreher is the biggest promoter of the idea, which takes its name from the Benedictine monasteries that acted as centers of Christian faith, both for the monks that lived within them and (more relevantly for me!) the lay communities that sprang up in the shadow of... Read more

Running the (Terrible for Catholics) Numbers on Conversion

Last updated on: May 19, 2015 at 12:58 pm By Leah Libresco

The Pew Religious Landscape Survey gave the chance to write some code and run the numbers on religious churn, retention, and conversions for my day job at FiveThirtyEight. Here are a few highlights: Evangelical Protestants Are The Biggest Winners When People Change Faiths The numbers presented by Pew help describe current patterns, but they don’t tell the whole story of which denominations are most attractive to people who might be looking for a new one. Gain and loss numbers can... Read more

7QT: Not Breathing, Not Marrying, and Opening Beers With Your Teeth

Last updated on: May 15, 2015 at 5:24 pm By Leah Libresco

— 1 — So, remember how I mentioned that the last question at my book talk in DC was about transhumanism? Well, here’s a particularly amusing body augmentation: If you’re a rugby player, you’re going to take a lot of hits — and you might even lose a tooth or two. Rather than replace those lost incisors with regular old implants, athletes might consider something more useful — a steel tooth that doubles as a bottle opener. — 2 —... Read more

Using N-Dimensional Spaces to Learn to Think About God

Last updated on: May 14, 2015 at 2:23 pm By Leah Libresco

I had a great time speaking about Arriving at Amen at the Catholic Information Center last night (especially during the Q&A section — there were a couple I’m still mulling) and the audio from that event should wind up online eventually. Plus, you can see me live (and ask questions of your own — the last one at the CIC was about transhumanism) in NYC on May 26th and Boston on June 2nd. In the meantime, EWTN News Nightly put up... Read more